Music / The Armed Man, Canberra Choral Society and the National Capital Orchestra, conducted by Louis Sharpe. At Llewellyn Hall, July 5. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

This splendid program that filled the Llewellyn stage with a big choir and orchestra might have been entitled The Armed Man, but it opened with Elena Kats-Chernin’s Human Waves, a series of sharp reflections on elements of migrations to Australia with words by Tamara-Anna Cislowska. 

Choir and orchestra under the baton of Louis Sharpe, all very aware that both Kats-Chernin and Karl Jenkins deal with much that reflects critically on current turbulent events, gave Human Waves its proper clarity.

It’s a series of short pieces framed by some of the citizenship expectations that immigrants to Australia are supposed to take on.

Loyalty, citizenship, law, all feature in Cislowska’s frequently ironic text. Chinese, Vietnamese, Middle Eastern and the rest all battle with culture shock in landscape, in beach behaviour, in employment, in a 1951 Sunday when nothing is open. The strangeness of Vegemite is celebrated in a way that is humorously filtered through foreign perspectives. And the landscape becomes something to wonder at.

Soprano Jillian Halleron gave a lovely lone voice to one woman’s connection to her culture and her name and the choir dealt very well with the changes of mood and narrative.

The Armed Man took up the second half of the program and this better known piece was a powerful choice to program with the much more recent Kats-Chernin.

It uses Christian liturgy among a range of texts that include mediaeval folk song and much more modern poetry. It makes clear the contrast between jingoism and the reality of war. It has a mass-like shape but gives room to many voices including Kipling, the Mahabharata and the Islamic Call to Prayer. This last, near the beginning, was delivered here with great focus and dignity by a robed Bilal Berjaoui.

The choir sang with a strong awareness of changing moods and styles and the orchestra’s support, especially in a score busy with percussion, was constant. Soprano Halleron was lyrical and focused, particularly in the terse song of the survivor, Now the Guns Have Stopped. And in what is probably the best known section of the work, The Benedictus, cello soloist Liam Meany came forward on a very crowded stage to let the cello purposefully lead the way.

A challenging and absorbing afternoon of music for difficult times.